ABSTRACT
This chapter considers different ways in which patients use narrative and when and to what extent it is helpful for the therapist to succumb to the patient's rhetoric and "join the dance", assuming that the aim of therapy is to effect psychic change. The therapist is helpful as a critical reader/listener who can supply the distance from the narrative which the patient himself eventually needs to assume. Christopher Bollas shows how the patient can use therapy to enhance the defensive reveries and to seduce the therapist, often along with a great variety of other practitioners, to join in with them. It is important to observe countertransference reactions in order to understand the nature of a patient's narrative. Auerhahn emphasises the importance of an interpretation carrying conviction for both therapist and patient and for those to whom it is reported. The reconstruction of a patient's narrative is not just an arbitrary or random procedure.
